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Comment by jdminhbg | Hacker News Reader

It’s kind of insane that the third-party client situation lasted the way it did for so long. Twitter subsidized someone else’s paid app, that didn’t show any of Twitter’s ads, for free, for years.

I exclusively used Tweetbot, and checking out the first-party clients this weekend confirms to me that they’re still pretty bad. But I knew that eventually this day was coming. Twitter never made properly supporting third party clients a priority, by either finding a way to charge for access or finding a way to ensure ads were in the feeds. It couldn’t keep going the way it was, and obviously Elon has no interest in devoting any time/attention to it.

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It was a mutualistic, not parasitic, relationship. Twitter's product development stagnated the day they nerfed the third party dev api.

3rd party Twitter clients were once considered a design playground where the best elements not only influenced Twitter's future design language, but also that of iOS as a whole. Tweetie's pull-to-refresh is emblematic of that. I'm pretty sure Tweetbot invented the (partial) left/right swipe to invoke different actions on tweets that have since become a mainstay of email apps.

Didn't the "pull down to refresh" UX come from one of them?

Yes, it was invented by Lauren Brichter in Tweetie, which was purchased by Twitter to become the official first-party client.

The facts:

Twitter didn’t have a first party client for years, the clients banned Friday are those that came first.

Core features and the name of those features Twitter has today came from third party apps.

Twitter forces third party clients to pay them money to use the new API which is needed for them to function as full clients but the new API is worse than the old one which was free to use.

Twitter chooses not to show ads for third party clients.

>the clients banned Friday are those that came first.

Tweetbot was a client banned on Friday that was released a year after the official Twitter app.

Wasn’t the first official Twitter app an acquisition of a 3rd party app ?

Yes, twitter bought out tweetie and rebranded it to Twitter for iPhone in 2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweetie

>Twitter subsidized someone else’s paid app, that didn’t show any of Twitter’s ads, for free, for years.

That's one way to put it. The other side is those third-party apps brought Twitter users for years.

How? Can you even sign up in third-party apps? Those third-party app users were already Twitter users before. Maybe you meant they wouldn't remain Twitter users because they can't tolerate the default app experience?

Is it impossibly surprising that someone might only bother to use the normal app for the purpose of signing up for the service so they can use another app they heard of? Think of recent versions of Internet Explorer: "what is my purpose?" "you install Chrome." (But, yeah: I'd say that it isn't even quite about maintaining the user but the extent to which they continue to engage; like, the user might still be a user, but are they someone who spends the entire day using the app? A number of these alternative clients were what were being used by teams of people to be able to manage the really complex/important accounts.)

Before twitter apps (note that twitter didn’t have a first party one for a long time; the early stuff was all third party), I barely used twitter; after I used it all the time.

I’d already kicked the habit (or rather replaced one addiction with another and moved to mastodon) after the purge of the journalists, but if I hadn’t this would be the end of twitter for me; the first party stuff is borderline unusable.

I suspect Saint Car has misunderstood how dependent power users are on the third party apps.

The maths from Twitter's probably is that those users mostly are power users producing a lot of content other users want to see. If they leave the platform Twitter could risk losing more.

Most power users don't use a third party apps. And most power users aren't "famous".

>If they leave the platform Twitter could risk losing more.

The people leaving need twitter's audience much more than twitter needs them.

I can certainly say that anyone who isn’t an idiot has been using 3rd party apps for years. And now they’re all gone from the platform…

Don't underestimate the number of stupid people on Earth :)

Whenever there is an article on big tech, I always expect the top comment I see to be in support of the company.

I was not disappointed :-)

I am not sure how pointing out that Twitter has not, over the course of a decade, managed to make a client as good as third-party ones made with 1/1000th the headcount, nor figured out a way to monetize them, is “in support” of Twitter. Should I just edit in a few “Space Karens” to make you feel better?

> Twitter subsidized someone else’s paid app

I thought the larger developers had to pay Twitter to use their API?

the same will happen to reddit as well I think. then I will truly have no social media presence other than linkedin at all

linked in has ads

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